The article discusses the work of J. R. R. Tolkien in the context of the concept of hope as it is defined in the Thomist philosophical system. The thrust of the argument is that the distinction between the two meanings of the word: hope defined as an appetitive passion of the soul and hope understood as one of the theological virtues provides a viable conceptual key to a discussion of the way in which the idea of hope functions in J. R. R. Tolkien’s classic works of fantasy fiction. The analysis seeks to trace the evolution of this basic dichotomy throughout The Lord of the Rings and the most pertinent sections of the legendarium presenting how the notion of hope functions for the civilization of the Elves and of Men, and also how the interaction between the passion and the virtue of hope impacts upon the construction and function of some of the key the individual characters of Tolkien’s fiction.

The article presents the results of the second part of an eye-tracking study conducted on Polish secondary school students working with a textbook for learning English. 20 dyslexic and 20 non- dyslexic school students worked with two sets of materials that had different graphic layouts but the same content. Their eye movements were recorded. The analysed data show that the arrangement of the material and images on the textbook page influence both the way the students (especially dyslexic ones) work with the book and their results.

Claude Carloman de Rulhière was a French diplomat and writer who was sent to Russia in 1762 as a secretary to the French ambassador. During his stay in St. Petersburg, he eye-witnessed the coup d’état staged by the future Catherine II to dethrone Peter III and to seize the imperial power. Upon his return to Paris, Rulhière publicized his testimony of the event. It soon became notorious and provoked controversy, splitting French elites into supporters and detractors of Catherine II. The agents of the empress attempted to persuade him not to divulge his text, but Rulhière did not succumb to their financial offers and resolved to reveal the truth.

The analysis of the Italian preposition su in spatial contexts (static, involving undirectional movement or dynamic) leads to the conclusion that su engenders support and contiguity schema interpretation in whatever context it appears. The term support implies terms such as surface and contiguity (contact). In both static and dynamic contexts the location of a trajector is visualized as contigously situated on the surface of the landmark. In both cases the landmark is an idealized plane whose boundaries are perceptively unimportant in a given configuration, even though in the real world they are clearly cut. The boundaries, which are not focalized, render possible the temporal uses of the unit su with the meaning of an approximate location in time.

The Polish equivalents of su phrases are the following: na+loc, na+acc, po+loc, około(koło)+gen. The structures na+loc, na+acc involve the support and contiguity schema. The construction około(koło) +gen can be analyzed with near – far schema and applies to the approximate location in space and time in Polish. The schematic meaning is conveyed not only by prepositional units but also by inflectional case governed by prepositions. Usually such a case is convergent with dynamic (accusative) or static (locative, genitive) predication.

The purpose of this article is to present main literary relations between an Italian novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello and his compatriot, modern writer Antonio Tabucchi, which manifest themselves primarily in the subject matter taken up by Tabucchi: an identity crisis of a literary character. Comparative analysis of the content of the novels One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand and Pereira Maintains shows, that the ‘disciple’ of Pirandello not only liked to reach for a similar subject matter, but also referred to the poetics used by the Sicilian.

The article aims to investigate the problem of desemanticizing of phrasemes containing names of body parts, and at the same time referring to the emotional sphere. Within the three main research areas (face, heart and body as a whole), and based on three types of semes (spatial, physical and functional), the analysis allows to determine the participation of individual sems in the process of motivating the indicated phraseological relationships.

This paper presents a multidisciplinary model built across linguistics and selected research and hypotheses in the field of quantum physics and molecular biology. The conceptual link between the biological concept of protein sequencing and the anthropocentric assumptions concerning the operationalization of language rules will be discussed. The multidisciplinary model shows the link between the concept of sequencing language rules and constructing textemes.

This paper presents the acoustic features of speech recorded during interactions with foreigners in Danish and Finnish languages in the light of Speech Accommodation Theory. It presents selective aspects of speech attuning to linguistically less-fluent interlocutors in temporal and spectral perspectives. Foreigner-directed speech and native talk were compared in a spectral (F0, vowel space and intensity) and a temporal domain (phones per second). The results were correlated with the participants’ degree of exposure to foreigners and attitude towards them measured by means of a questionnaire. It was concluded that personal attitude towards interlocutors causes hyperarticulation. It was also shown, however, that the differences between the given instances of conversation are the strongest in the temporal domain, and not in the spectral domain.

The aim of the paper is to analyse the Italian medical terminology, in particular will be taken into consideration the link between names of different illnesses and rhetoric procedures that might have influenced their lexical form. The examples of medical nomenclature will enable to illustrate the attitude towards the concept of illness and to show the complexity of phenomena perception and the impossibility to understand them completely. For this reason literary tropes, especially metonymy, enable to create terminology, although it will be never enough sufficient to guarantee the highest precision of these concepts.